SM4ALL Project

The Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica “Antonio Ruberti” of the University of Roma spans more than 12 in FP6 EU projects. The MIDLAB and DASILab prior and current EU involvements include the coordination of WORKPAD and the following participations:

NoE ReSIST: Resilience for Survivability in IST (www.resist-noe.org). This is a Network of Excellence that integrates researchers active in the multidisciplinary domains of Dependability, Security, and Human Factors, in order that Europe will have a well-focused coherent set of research activities aimed at ensuring that future "ubiquitous computing systems" (the immense systems of ever-evolving networks of computers and mobile devices which are needed to support and provide Ambient Intelligence), have the necessary resilience and survivability, despite any residual development and physical faults, interaction mistakes, or malicious attacks and disruptions. SemanticGov aims at building the infrastructure (software, models, services, etc) necessary for enabling the offering of semantic web services by public administration (PA). Through this cutting edge infrastructure, SemanticGov will address longstanding challenges such as achieving interoperability amongst PA agencies both within a country as well as amongst countries, easing the discovery of PA services by its customers, facilitating the execution of complex services often involving multiple PA agencies in interworkflows.

EU-Publi.com project aims at implementing a "secure Intranet" that can interconnect at the application level the ISs of public administrations across several European countries. Besides providing the essential interconnection services (e-mail, file transfer, etc.) to administrations by supplying them with basic interoperability tools, the project aims at defining an Unitary European Network Architecture as a whole, by bringing together the collection of distributed, autonomous systems of each administration into a common Cooperative Architecture.

MIDAS project scope was to prepare a roadmap for the development of new project proposals in the area of middleware. The main objective of MIDAS was to create a research roadmap for the development of the next generation middleware capable of supporting services that are composable and adaptable within the context of large scale systems where quality of service issues ranging from fault-tolerance, timeliness to security and survivability are of paramount importance.

DELOS is a Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries partially funded by the European Commission in the frame of the Information Society Technologies Programme (IST). DELOS is conducting a joint program of activities aimed at integrating and coordinating the ongoing research efforts of the major European teams working in Digital Library-related areas. Its main objective and goal is to develop the next generation of Digital Library technologies, based on sound comprehensive theories and frameworks for the life-cycle of Digital Library information.

DELOS is currently working on the development of a Digital Library Reference Model that is designed to meet the needs of the next-generation systems, and on a globally integrated prototype implementation of a Digital Library Management System, called DelosDLMS, which will serve as a concrete partial implementation of the reference model and will encompass many software components developed by DELOS partners.

INTEROP Network of Excellence is an instrument for strengthening excellence of European research in interoperability of enterprise applications, by bringing together the complementary competences needed to develop interoperability in a more global and innovative way, taking into account different perspectives, namely architectures, enterprise modelling and ontologies. In the Interop approach, the interoperability is considered to be achieved if the interaction can, at least, take place at the three levels: data, applications and business enterprise through the architecture of the enterprise model and taking into account the semantics. It is not only a problem of software and IT technologies. It implies support of communication and transactions between different organisations that must be based on shared business references.

As far as WORKPAD, that is currently coordinated by UOR (Tiziana Catarci is the coordinator and Massimo Mecella is the technical manager), it deals with the study, design and development of a 2-level peer-to-peer software and communication infrastructures for operators in emergency management, in which the peculiar features are the use of data integration techniques on GRIDs infrastructures, the use of MANETs of PDAs for operators on the front-end, the provision of novel techniques for adaptive process management of services in order to support such operators, the integration with geo-based and context-based techiques in order to provide a truly flexible environment.